Thursday, January 29, 2015

Just about exactly four years ago the South African Institute of Race
Relations (IRR) released a report called Broken Blue Line. The report documented the involvement of
members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) in serious crime. A variety of recommendations were made and
there was some uptake of these by the authorities.

Yesterday the IRR and sponsor AfriForum
released a follow-up report - titled Broken Blue Line 2 – to assess how the
situation had changed over the last four years.
The murder rate in South Africa over that period has actually dropped by
about 50%, but violent crime has greatly increased, so the background was not encouraging and neither were the findings of the report.

The report is not concerned with corruption -
police taking bribes for turning a blind eye or the like – the report is
concerned with the involvement of police officers in serious, mainly violent,
crime. One would hope that no incidents of this type would be
identified. (A somewhat cursory search
of reports concerning the London Metropolitan police turned up zero reports of
criminal activity of this nature.) In
the case of the SAPS, reports of 100 such incidents were collected in a
relatively short time (a few weeks). The authors of the report claim that
several hundred more instances could be discovered if more time had been
allocated to the search. The hope that
real progress had been made since 2011 was rapidly dashed.

Of the 100 incidents written up, 32 related to murders or
attempted murders, 22 related to armed robberies, 26 related to rapes, and
another 20 related to thefts, robberies and torture. (Some years ago, my stepmother called the police after she had been violently robbed and assaulted. During the police investigation, her handbag
was stolen. This level of pilfering would not have been regarded as serious
enough to make the list of police criminal activities.)

Good guys or bad guys?

The report points out that it is to “the credit of the
police, that many of these cases only entered the public domain because the
police reported having arrested a suspect or suspects who happened to be police
officers. This is a very good thing and we certainly came across more evidence
of such arrests than in 2011. However, that is about as far as the silver
lining extends…” The question is, how many more cases are out there that were
never followed up or never even reported?
There are documented cases of police committing armed robberies in
uniform with police service weapons!
The point is to persuade the victims that there is really no point in
reporting the attack. There is also
evidence of police “clones”: criminal gangs dressed as police in police
vehicles. It is easy to see how this
might help them with their dirty work.
However, the report suggests that this sort of activity could hardly
take place without the involvement of some policemen. As they put it, the criminals have
infiltrated the police rather than the other way around.

Broken Blue Line quotes some
pretty unsettling statistics including that nearly 1500 serving police officers - more than 1% - have been
convicted of a crime ranging from assault, through rape, to murder. Again, one has to wonder how many have not been convicted.

The SAPS management reaction has been
vitriolic. Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega said the report had been released
with “malicious intent” and complained that her picture had been used on the
report without her permission. "I didn't invent crime," she reportedly said. The
methodology and statistics were challenged.
So far, however, there has been no unequivocal denial that there is a structural problem within the SAPS.

It seems only fair to consider the possible bias of the
authors of the report. AfriForum is a
pretty conservative and almost pure white, Afrikaans based, organization that describes itself in
these terms:

AfriForum works to ensure that the basic prerequisites
for the existence of Afrikaners are met, by acting as a credible Afrikaner
interest organisation and civil rights watchdog – as part of the Solidarity
Movement – outside the workplace on national and local level to handle the
impact of the current political realities facing Afrikaners, and to influence
those realities, while working simultaneously to establish sustainable
structures through which Afrikaners are able to ensure their own future.

However, although AfriForum funded it, the report
was written by the Institute of Race Relations. IRR has been around since 1933 and
makes the justified claim that:

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the IRR emerged as the leading
anti-apartheid think-tank as it used its formidable policy expertise to
undermine the ideas underpinning that system and propose a workable alternative
South Africa.It has believed
throughout its history, as it does today, that a secure and peaceful future can
be built only on the principle of one South African nation of different racial
and ethnic groups, each allowed to maintain its own cultural identity, all
united in a common loyalty, but all tolerant of diversity and dissent.

Frans Cronje, one of the authors. The others were Thuthukani Ndebele & John Kane Berman

IRR is a respected institution
in South Africa, albeit one which is accused of talking when more proactive
action was needed in the apartheid years. A report from the IRR cannot be
dismissed simply as ‘malicious’.

Broken Blue Line 2 puts forward
some proposals for consideration. Most
are similar to those of 2011 but updated. They focus on raising the standard
and respect for police management by requiring better levels of education, depoliticising
the appointment of senior officers, and decentralising appointments. On the flip side they recommend more teeth
for the Independent Police Investigation Directorate and an external agency within the Department
of Justice.

The report concludes that “The
good news is that there are policy solutions available. We are not therefore
dealing with a problem that cannot be solved. Rather it is a question of
whether the government has the courage to implement these solutions. Each of
the solutions we propose are entirely within the powers of the government to
implement.”

In apartheid days the police storm troopers committed crimes against blacks with government support. Now, it seems that some of the current police force is committing crimes against everybody. The way to stop it seems clear. I hope it happens before it gets so entrenched it will be impossible to cut it out. What a cancer on society!